Argh! I've really stirred up a hornet's nest, haven't I? And
here I am trying to get the work done I should have been
doing earlier, when I was writing the first batch of
messages.
OK, first, Mark:
"The city flipped from Republican stronghold to totally
Democratic almost overnight" falls under poetic license. It
wasn't a slow process with suspense-filled elections for
decades, but it wasn't literally overnight.
Re "Square miles of homes and factories for the working class
were gutted to create Independence Mall, downtown upper-class
neighborhoods, and public housing highrises for the
displaced. Levittown was born."
Independence Mall was there in 1966 when I started working
part-time at the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. ("Behind your
independence stands the Penn Mutual" but it moved to
Horsham). "Improvements" were still being made to the vacant
land, but everything had been torn down. The Liberty Bell was
in Independence Hall, and I stopped in to see it once a week
or so. The colonial houses around St. James--priceless!--and
the Dock Street markets were torn down to build Alcoa's
Society Hill Towers for the rich; the federal houses south of
Pine fell for public housing towers; the factory where my
father-in-law worked was leveled to build the IM Pei houses
for the well-to-do. The people who owned houses in Society
Hill had their deeds pulled, and they could regain them only
by meeting redevelopment standards--put up proper shutters in
the proper colors, no window air conditioners, no more
rooming houses, tear down the brick steps and build marble
steps, etc.--which meant that all the poor and working-class
people lost their neighborhood and their homes.
Our local newspaper recently had a
feature article on the first blacks to move into Levittown,
PA, which might have been a 50th anniversary, matching your
estimate and mine. There is (was?) a big steel mill there,
and GI Bill mortgages made the houses affordable. Those
houses were tiny, though, not even as big as the Queen
Village trinities (3 1-room floors). There's a Levittown, New
Jersey, too, but it was renamed Willingboro in the 1970s or
so. Actually, I don't know why I mentioned Levittown at
all--Can I claim poetic license again?
> The Independence Mall that exists now was built in
the 70's. The
> Pennsylvania Levittown was just north of Bristol and
was begun with the
> idea of building houses for returning GIs and their
bigger famililies.
That was started >in the 50's, I think, or maybe even late
40's.
>
Joy, who sat down here to send e-mail to her boss
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